Starting your own business doesn’t have to be expensive. Some of the businesses I’ve started are e-commerce sites, information sites with Adsense, and a web design business. In this post, I’m going to talk about a few low cost business ideas that you can get started with a very low upfront investment and quickly become profitable.

Physical Products

Selling physical products online is how I got started. There are many options for selling products online and two that I used were Ebay and E-commerce.

Ebay

Ebay is how I got my start making a living online. The nice thing about Ebay is that they already have a ton of traffic to their site. You just have to pick the right products to sell. Here are some general ideas and tips:
1. Log into Ebay and do some research on products that have already sold. When you do the search, check the “Complete” box to view prices that various items have sold for.
2. Some people use garage sales and estate sales to find items to resell on ebay for profit. The key is to be able to spot value and become familiar with various products. With an iPhone, you can do your research on the spot.
3. Items that sell well on Ebay include rare collectibles and low priced items.
4. Consider making your own items. There are people that make a good living on Ebay doing this as there is no inventory cost.

E-commerce

E-commerce stores aren’t necessarily that costly to start either, but involve a lot more work up front. I learned the basics of HTML online from Davesite HTML tutorial.

The downsides are that you’ll have to spend time learning and implementing SEO and uploading the products onto your site. But if you are willing to put some work into it upfront, then e-commerce can be very lucrative.

You can even create your own products and go into wholesale as well to further leverage your profits. To get started, come up with your web marketing plan first so you can get things going quickly.

Information Based Products

Information products are great because they cost almost nothing to create (if you write them yourself) and can produce recurring income. People are always looking for information on all kinds of topics.

Blogs

It takes time to build a blog, but as you keep writing and promoting, expect to see increasing traffic and earnings over time. Blogs can be monetized in many ways, including posting ads, promoting affiliate products, or selling your own products, like ebooks and reports.

Content Site

Content sites are another popular way to make money on the internet. By using the Google Keyword tool, you can see some of the topics that people are searching for and create websites around those topics. Putting up some advertisements, like Google Adsense, or promoting affiliate products can produce additional income. For several years, this was one of my favorite ways to make money online, because once the work was done, the income was pretty much passive and recurring.

eBooks and Info courses

eBooks are another good way to make money on line. An ebook or PDF report doesn’t have to be super long – as long as your customer feels like they are getting good value for what they paid.

Info courses are similar but can contain video and audio. This raises the perceived value and allows people to sell information at higher prices. Add-ons like coaching and membership features can be used to raise the price even further or increase the number of sales for your product.

Services

Offering your services is another low cost way to get started making money online. This type of business can be profitable right away and there are many websites that will help you get started. Job networks like Elance and Odesk have tons of work available for contractors and job sites and boards like Craigslist and Simply Hired can offer other opportunities.

Web Design

I was surprised at how quickly I was able to get going with a new web design business, especially with the abundance of other web designers out there. A lot of people need websites for their business or personal reasons. You can get business in various ways – networking, job networks like Elance, responding to job postings, and more. If you do great work, then eventually, word of mouth referrals and repeat business alone can keep you pretty busy.

Writing

Writing is another good area that you can get into. People with native English backgrounds will have an advantage over lower cost offshore providers. Although some people will always go for the lowest price, there are plenty of people who don’t have the time or want to be bothered with rewriting articles.

With recent changes in Google’s search engine algorithm that penalize duplicate content, web writing has become even more important. The key is to specialize in your topic of interest or field of expertise. A good copywriter can make six figures, as they are making their clients a lot more than that.